The salacious sexual adventures of a 72-year-old gay American ex-pat living and loving a Peter Pan fantasy in the bowels of the “Evil Empire.” Peppered with insightful political and social observations: “When I first adopted this Reagan euphemism for Russia,” he says, “it was meant as tongue-in-cheek satire, but the label is becoming increasingly apt. Putin’s Kremlin never relaxes its tightening stranglehold on the Russian press, the courts, and the parliament. We’re seeing the re-Stalinization – or worse, the Hitlerization -- of Russia. Who knows what’s coming next?”

“I am living in your future,” he warns his American compatriots on the other side of the globe. “While you sit on your Armani–clad ass, Bushmaster Junior screams terrorism and installs The Big Brother Society in a neighborhood near you. And you don’t even notice!”

Watch the occasionally scandalous, sometimes touching, frequently hilarious, and always unpredictable day-to-day adventures of this former American journalist and his coterie of all-American Russian boys (some, a fourth his age) unfold in this ongoing saga. “What’s wrong with these guys? When I was their age, my worst nightmare would have been the thought of having sex with me.”

It’s all true. “Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent – (and me -- from lawsuits. If it’s considered damaging to reputation, it’s slander and defamation in Russia -- even if it’s true; das heisst big bucksi.”

- Have you ever bought an apartment and had it stolen by your best friend?

- Have you ever bedded down between a pair of naked, uncut 20-year-old twins who want you to live with them for the rest of your life?

- Have you ever had an 18-year-old tell you he loves you so much he wants you to be buried with him in his family crypt?

It’s all just

….Another Night in the Evil Empire….

“Yegor, Anton, Shurik, and I consider ourselves a family. So we find ourselves living in a bizarre 21st century gay Dickensian novel peopled with an old American queen, a young North Ossetian, a Tajik, a 19-year-old from the Caucuses, and a whole cast of Russians, not knowing how we’re going to get written to the next chapter, much less how the book is going to end – and fervently hoping it won’t!”

-- “Another Night…” #4, Sept. 29, 2003

- a little wisdom

- a fair amount of humor

- a lot of empathy and compassion

- a whole lot of sex

Yesterday in my business class near Novoslobodskaya Station we talked about age. “What do you think is the best age to be?” I asked. One said his teens; another said 27, the age he was; 60-year-old Yuri recalled his 30s as the best years.

How I wanted to tell them that they were all wrong, that 70 was far and away the best time of your life. I wanted to tell them how I am surrounded by beautiful young people whom I love and who love me, how I am having ongoing sex with four of them at present. I wanted to tell them about the dozens of beautiful young Russians I’ve made love to in the six years I’ve been here.

But they wouldn’t have believed me anyway.

Who would?

- -Another Night, #44, February 12, 2004

Red Queen at Night (sailors’ delight)

Red Queen at Morning (sailors take warning)

….As a kid, I took a look around me at all the stern, authoritarian, pig-headed, tyrannical adult males that surrounded me – including my father -- and concluded: If that’s what being a man is, I don’t want to be one.

Is that why I’m gay? I doubt it, though I think role models may have been a factor. But there were lots of other genetic and environmental contributors. Anyway, who’s to say? In any case, my mother was a much more admirable role model than my old man, and if I had a goal in life, it was to be as kind and compassionate as she was. I hope I’ve succeeded, at least partially; and if being as kind and compassionate as I know how to be makes me a pansy, then I’ll be a pansy and a damned proud one!